The point of this post is our art project – Resurrection Altar!

What is Resurrection Altar?
Resurrection altar is a communal art project with a tad bit of environmental and geek consciousness. Over the span of seven days we will decorate the Altar with different Rangoli design, which folks are welcome to participate in making! At the Altar you can make your resurrection wish and tie a piece of plastic to the AltarCross! At the end of the burningman we will burn the AltarCross and make a plastic monster out of the Resurrection plastic bands. This monster will live until you resurrect, right?

Time for pictures. These are all the making of, pictures!

Fig 1. A 20×30inch Poster – our camp sign during the day!

Fig  2. Altar camp sign – This sign will illuminate at Night

Fig 3. Rangoli Design – The Jain Map of Universe. We will make a stencil out of this.

Fig 4. Rangoli Design – we will make a stencil out of this.

Fig 5. The AltarCross.

More pictures coming! Come help out with the preparations!!

On Aug 21-22, I’ll attempt to climb Mt. Rainier with Team Asha. Through the season the Team has really prepared hard to make this a successful and enjoyable climb! All the familiar faces and a very familiar cause! Please support the climbers and the cause!

The Cause?

I have climbed Rainier in 2006, 2009 with a different causes – ranging from personal to helping Mayaboli school.  I’m continuing the same causes this time but also helping a tiny bit in making other climbers succeed in their personal and benevolent goals!

I’m looking forward to amazing weather, a great team and fun times! I get to use my climber’s pass again this season!

Support

Fig 1. 1300 miles from Chennai to Goa

Pic 1. Geared up to 40+ pounds .

We got there bright and early on Saturday and got a permit for Kautz route!

Pic 2. Permit =  good to climb Rainier for a year!

We started from the parking lot at about 9am.

Pic 3. Rob geared up!

Our plan for Kautz was to drop in to Nisqually glacier then go up the Wilson and camp near camp Hazard (11,500 ft). To give an idea there were about 200 people on the standard DC route and 10 on Kautz. Two parties of 5 and 2, just ahead of us. .

Turns out that we over simplified the terrain and got carried away with good weather . As soon as we dropped in to Nisqually glacier from a steep slope we realized that we weren’t prepared for the steepness ahead of us. As I plunged stepped down cautiously, Sumeet behind me took a tumble and got to practice his newly learnt ice axe arrest technique. I’m still amazed how fearless he is and always ready to go new and exciting stuff, while I’m a bit on the timid side .

We regrouped on the glacier and decided that we will do Kautz some other day and may try and scoot over to Camp Muir and see if we can make our way through the standard DC route. It was already about 11am so kind of late to go try Emmons.

We hauled our selves up to Camp Muir and got there around 3pm. Our goal was to try and get to Ingraham flats and camp there so that we can get start ahead of the crowds. Turns out a ranger was meticulously taking a toll, we explained him our story and requested if we can scoot on this route instead of Kautz. He was really helpful and told us that higher camp is difficult but he will try and find a place for us at Camp Muir. Well 15 minutes later he told us that there are simply just too many people on the route and they had to turn some people back from the ranger stations. With over 200 people on the route it was best of us to come and try some other day . We didn’t push too hard, and decided to cook our meals at Camp Muir and head down.

It was perfect T-Shirt weather, I could even take off my shirt! We cooked some pineapple curry, chana Masala and had a party! We even offered some of our awesome food to few colleagues we ran in to at Camp Muir!!

Overall it was awesome weather great time, may be we get to use our climbing passes soon !

I have done this ride in twice before (2006 – 70miles, 2007 – 100 miles). I had a sort of deja vu from 2007 I started getting cramps around mile 70, but the good part of I’m quite happy with how i pushed myself. I learnt two things –

1. Human body is amazing, if you push it can survive a lot of things. I ended up pushing through the last 3 miles hill with cramps, after a few pedals the cramps disappeared.

2. Make sure your condition your muscles for performance not just endurance. I did hard run on Thursday and I was still sore from it. I should use my training time effectively, just like Body by Science.

Anyways, the Asha Team and Emel (a friend from Run, Dinner Social) did awesome! Most riders finished the 65 mile loop, now folks are eyeing the STP. Emel did awesome on her first century beating me by a full hour!

My stats: Ride time 8 hours 20 min. No where good but given the conditions I’m very happy with how i pushed myself.

Now the pictures.

 
7:30 start ended up being 8:20 start as i forgot my helmet

 
Gorgeous sunny day!
 
Rest Stops – I did about 1:30 of rest stop time (Slacker )

Finish line fiesta and team Asha

I have been meaning to do a few outdoorsy things this summer, and wanted to started chalking my list here so that friends and family can join in, talk me in to and out of few things -

• Rock-climbing & Bouldering
  • A weekend bouldering trip to Squamish!
  • Climbing as many single-pitch 5.8s as I can. May be pick up Exit-38 Wednesdays!
  • Goal: Outer space (?) (July 2nd week or Aug 2nd week) – Outer space is a six pitch climb near Leavenworth, and it has been my goal since i started cragging a couple of years ago. Given my space and rock-climbing touch, it might not happen this year but still a worthy goal.
• Mountaineering –
  • Mt. Adams (June 19th?)
  • Mt. Baker (June 26th)
  • Mt. Shuskan (?)
  • Goal: Lead a trip up Mt. Rainier (July 17th), may be two
  • Goal: One ice-climb, may be Mt. Hood late in the season (Aug 1st week?)
• Cycling
  • Flying Wheels Summer Century! (June 12th)
  • Goal: Lead a week-long trip along Oregon Coast (week of July 24th), in preparation to India biking adventure.
• Motorcycling
  • Now that i still have my SV650s for this season I would love to do some long riding and track days with it. I have already been eyeing some routes.
  • Goal: Do at-least one long ride and one track day!
• Backpacking
  • Yosemite (?) (Late summer Aug(?))
  • Need suggestions and friends to go with!
• Hiking & Camping
  • Granite Mountain
  • Camp Muir
  • Goal: At-least do one camping trip with friends
• Try a new activity
  • Rafting down Yakima river! (July 4th –?)
  • Sea-kayaking or Sailing
  • Goal: Learn to swim in open water

May be I should make a outdoor activities calendar. Making it public is a little itchy but hey its summer in the northwest!!

Lowell introduced me to this workout, and has been coaching me through past few weeks. The book – Body Of Science describes the workout in detail. However, in short the idea is to design as efficient a workout as possible. Our muscles are made up of four kinds of fibers (slow twitch, 3 fast twitch – oxidative, glycolytic and oxidative/glycolytic) each of those engage in different activities (strength, endurance etc). Our muscle fibers grow stronger only if we push them hard, to the point that they fail. Once that happens the body reacts by building better muscles over a recovery time!! So an ideal workout is the one which engages all the muscle fibers and gets them to the point of failure as quickly as possible! Well that is what, Body By Science is about!

In the work-out one tries to engage major muscles groups one at a time, by putting them under load (i.e weight) and doing it in a slow consistent way until the muscle group reaches to the point of failure and then we try to go for an extra bit (10 more seconds)! To illustrate the point here is a video of pulldown, starring Lowell :

The goal of each exercise is to increase the weight and time under load (TUL), repetitions are not that important. The idea is to start with a weight which one can do for at-least 45 seconds and each time increment the weight as soon as one can comfortably do it for 80 seconds or so. The ideal time for each rep is about 20 seconds! The Body by Science authors recommend 45-200 seconds for each workout, but from what we have been doing 60-90 second seems like an effective range for most folks.

Following are the results from last few weeks doing the five major muscles groups (note: core muscles are taken care of by all workout but specifically by shoulder press, leg press and pull-down).

(Please note: score is a connived measure of the entire routine which Lowell has been experimenting with, its a function of weight, time & reps)

More Resources -

• Lowell’s Blog
• My colleague – Keith Toussaint’s Health Man blog
• Body By Science – website

Comments/ Suggestions/ Questions?

• Its really easy to translate Ascii doc to doc-book format
• It has number of plug-ins for cool output formatters
• It has been used by a number of successful books.
• It has a very good cheat sheet.

Alrite, I’m convinced – so how does the initial conversion of my upcoming book look? Following is an example version of the same.

Next things to do:

• Move the real content to this format
• Add links for feedback

The intent of this post is to summarize my improvements in Snowboarding skills. Overall i went about 5-6 times snowboarding this season, once in winter and rest of the time in spring!

Progress this season?

I definitely improved my skills and speed by trying to connect turns more graciously than forcing my back/gliding leg to get me on toe-side! Leaning forward and then gradually getting on to toe-side helped a lot in my speed and grace! In fact, this was the exact skills the lesson at Tahoe last year focused on. I didn’t go any gracious black this year but I ended up trying the terrain park at Stevens pass, thanks to Jeff. I did a few 1-3 footer jumps, only to see the blue sky.

New gear this season?

Thanks to spring sale i finally bought a Giro helmet for under $40!

What I might try next season?

I’m an average intermediate snowboarder may be I’ll take a couple lessons next season to move up a notch, and possibly a vacation at Whistler to truly enjoy long runs! Meanwhile any tips to improve are welcome!

One of the joys of snowboarding is that you can get in to jumps pretty quickly, I know I’m pass my teens but may be next season I’ll try some jumps and my goal would be to at least do a 3 footer.

One of the things I noticed this season is that eventually i might want to learn skiing, yah I know I give hard time to skiers . No matter how long you snowboard you do fall, not so in skiing , the ability of the skiers to do backcountry and also a lot harder stuff (read moguls) easily is tempting me to try skiing next season, we’ll see.

I was attracted to Good Calories, Bad Calories sometime last year, primarily owing to my co-workers and friends (Chris, Lowell and Keith). Lowell is a very passionate ambassador of low-carb diet, he infact lost over 90 pounds in a year and a half by just changing his diet! The book is a dense read and I have barely finish first part.

I haven’t really switched to a low-carb diet, but Maris (specially) and myself have been looking in to ways to improve our vegetarian diets. The food in America is no way tuned for a healthy vegetarian diet. Maris researched on the protein aspects of the diet and came up with the idea of putting soy powder in curries. In fact she even bought a whole recipe book for tofu powdered cooking. The next culinary exploration we are going to try is vegetable smoothies.

As you will notice all our exploration has been to add protein to our vegetarian diets and eat more of leafy vegetables. But what i would take away from Gary’s book and talk is to actually try reducing the bad carbohydrates in our diets especially sugar, bread and white rice! I did end up asking a question along these lines to Gary and his frank answer was that he is not a good spokesperson for a vegetarian low-carb diet (given that all his bread substitutes are meaty/fatty), however one of his strongest proponent and friend is a vegan and he has seen improvements in health by reducing carbohydrates.

So what are bad carbohydrates?

• Starches (esp. Fructose)  and Sugars
• Bread
• Pasta

What should a vegetarian substitute these with?

• Soy  products
• Green leafy vegetables

Any tips?

• Start by reducing rice and bread in diet in lieu of salad!
• Introduce the morning vegetable breakfast smoothie !!

The strongest criticism of low-carb diet is that the fat substitutes (esp. meat) are bad for your heart and will increase risk for Heart Attack. For a vegetarian this is not really the case and any reduction is carb is good!! .

Any suggestions for good calories for vegetarian? Feel free to comment away!!